at night in a tent with forty-five other guys
you switch on your headlamp and pull the soul
out of your boot, the footbed –
everything you’ve had for all the months you’ve been
gone with your hand searching, fingernails picking at the corner
of the photo
until you’re able to look at it.

until you’re able to look at it
you build it up in your mind
every mission that your run
with your muzzle pressed the the small of a woman’s
back at the mess tent with the juices of a pseudo-American
burger running down your chin,
when the stones crunch under the tires
and Paint It Black sings you to sleep in the desert.

and Paint it Black sings you to sleep in the desert
after you’ve switched on your headlamp and pulled the soul
out of the small of a woman’s back,
everything you’ve had for all the months you’ve been
gone with your hand searching, fingernails picking at the corner
of your boot, the footbed –
until you’re able to look at it
at night in a tent with forty-five other guys.

I have no idea what it’s like to be so hungry that machine grease is a delicacy called ‘butter’,
No idea how many weeks of starvation it takes for a grandfather to call glycerin ‘honey’,
But I know what it’s like to yearn for something more than I have, for every cell in my body to stutter and pray for survival, for every fibre to bend towards the resurrection of Forgiveness.

I have seen bodies laying in the streets,
Surrounded by casings and all the ones that got away –

If I could close the open legs of Baghdad
I’m not sure that I would put another white face in their history books because I know what it’s like to be violently explored by foreigners I didn’t invite,
The impressions of boots take millennia to be blown out of dunes and valleys no matter how gentle or forceful be the wind that blows the sand.
Would I be wasting a miracle to paint over the cracks we have made?

If I sat on the edge of the world,
Would I overlook Jerusalem or Washington?
Two cities sharing a hill, both built on the backs of slaves, both strangers in a strange land,
Both fighting to keep the infidels out of a land they now call their own.
Would giving them eyes to see through their enemies’ be a waste of a miracle?

I have never lived through a tsunami,
Never had the earth lift up beneath me and come back down as water,
But I have felt the world shift beneath my feet.
I have run across fault lines and survived with only fragments left.
If I found myself in a tsunami, my brain tied up in knots, my legs unable to carry me far enough fast enough,
Would my fear of losing everything teach me how to swim through an ocean turned muddy with our fracking and drilling and drilling and drilling into the veins of the earth, our machines sucking out the blood like vampires?
Would I be a Democrat or Republican if I was swimming through this ocean of blood turned black with our hatred of the body it came from?
Would one miracle really be enough to redeem ourselves?

I have never been hungry enough to call machine grease ‘butter’,
If I could close the open legs of Baghdad, I’m not sure that I would put another white face in their history books,
If I sat on the edge of the world, I don’t know if I’d see Jerusalem or Washington,
And I have never lived through a tsunami,
But if I could grant the world one miracle, I wouldn’t know where to start.
Would one miracle really be enough to redeem ourselves?

America
When did the life seep out of your bones?
Can you hold you head up high or is it too heavy to pick back up?
Is it too full of worries about the future, we all worry about a future that will not be ours.
There will never be somebody whose love is perfect enough for you –
I tried to kiss you but you pulled away, you are just learning how to feel
but it is too late for all the countries who have felt you laying on top of them for years –

I told you not to kick at the hive but you couldn’t hear me over your drilling and your bombs,
That’s not what your ears are for.
The almighty god you are so in love with gave you those ears so you could
Hear the screams of a nation before it died,
Kicked by a boot you manufactured in China,
And aren’t you glad that you did?
This boot has walked all these miles to find its creator,
It has had too long to think –
How come you never write?

America
Your foster children around the world are getting restless,
They are stretching their legs and claiming their territory,
They are setting up boundaries, they are setting up borders.
What will you do when they have grown up?
Where will you go now that you’ve spent your retirement fund
On the hedge funds of your youth?
Sometime this world is not our home.

Let us wash our faces of this dust and forget how the dirt collects in our wounds.
Let the women mourn the way they have never had the time to mourn their men.
Let their men kneel on the roof, clearing their throats, and know those are not guns in their hands
but telescopes, they want to see the universe unfold without a bang.
Let our hearts beat fast without pulling our triggers.
Let there be room for doubt.

After the soldiers leave, Farha
And her three daughters and her two nieces and her mother
Spend a week cleaning the house
That has a hole where the door used to be.
They take all the china from the cupboards,
Pile it on the floor, on the table, on the counter;
It takes them two days to wash them.
Then, they put the vases to bed on the sofa
And, sitting in a circle on the floor, they all find a job
And soon the vases are clean.
They spend two days washing every piece of fabric
From every cupboard, every drawer.
They spend a night wiping all the walls,
Hours sweeping the floors.
But when Farha can’t find her burkas she realizes
This house will never again be her home.

inspired by Clinton’s post earlier this morning.
after Andrei Platonov.

On the morning he comes home
Regret folds through her body like hips
Undulating under a slave driver’s whip
And there is nothing for her to say except

I’m sorry

and nothing for her to do but to hope
it is enough
like the clouds hope the wind
is enough
like the dust hopes the sun
is enough
to pull from the soil what water
there once was hope
in the water they drank
but now there’s only the sting
of salt that they imagine
between sips of conversation
stinging in the wounds he wishes
he’d received because it would
give her a reason to care for him
like God used to care for His children.

FiveThousandDrones.com is writer, designer, journalist and political science student’s Aidan Gowland’s attempt to recreate the power, deception and closeness of war through his own poetry, prose and articles and through news stories, photographs and videos from around the web. It straddles the line between truth and fiction, to replicate the way memory works after trauma.